“What do you think you are doing?!” Alex hissed, trying to keep his voice down. He thought he was being attacked, and the suddenness of it had his heart pounding.

With the firelight flickering on her face, Lanna the barmaid had the decency to look embarrassed, even if anger still showed in the tight set of her jaw.

“You…” she trailed off, eyeing warily the fire-arrow still hovering over his hand. Then she took a deep breath, and something inside of her hardened. “What’s your business with Cedric?” She managed that with a straight voice.

Shooting a quick glance over his shoulder, Alex noted with no amount of relief that this little confrontation hadn’t been noticed by anyone else in the inn. The hallway she’d pulled him into was hidden by the bulk of the stairs, and the light coming from the open windows of the inn didn’t reach very far in. It wouldn’t do for people to think he’d assaulted the daughter of the innkeeper, even if it had been the other way around.

He turned back to Lanna. “Not very nice to listen in on your patrons' conversations,” Alex said, frowning.

“Are you with the CCC or something?” she carried on. “Trying to inspect his work? I’ll tell you right now, Cedric’s a good man, he is.”

That CCC again? Alex paused, considering. Maybe I could use this. He just had to be careful. “What’s it to you who I am?” he asked.

Lanna narrowed her pale eyes. “I washed your clothes last night,” she said. “Never touched anything so fine. Fabric so smooth it’d make a baby’s cheeks seem like gravel. You’re not a hopeful, no matter what you told my da’, or whatever you made Cedric and the others believe.”

Alex was stumped for a second. She thinks I’m rich and important because of my clothes… well, then. He puffed his chest out. “And you think you’re doing Cedric a favor by speaking on his behalf like this?” His tone held authority now.

She swallowed. “It doesn’t matter what I do. He’s innocent, you heard what my da’ said.”

“I did,” Alex said, nodding. As a gesture of good faith—and to keep her from screaming out to her father and people at the common room—he let go of his hold of the magic. The fire petered out, and the hallway fell into half-darkness again. Lanna breathed out a sigh of relief.

“But,” he continued, and here he took a step forward. “Were I what you accuse me of being, I would suspect that the records had been altered.” The barmaid's eyes widened, and Alex held back a smile. Just a little more pressure. “It wouldn’t be too hard for an experienced Chaser to do it without anyone else noticing. He would be pulling the wool over all your eyes.”

Lanna opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the stairs above them groaned. Heavy footsteps came stomping down. For the second time in a minute, her hands grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the hall. This time, Alex allowed it.

As they passed by an open door to his right that led downward into a cellar, then turned the corner into another hallway, Alex forced his expression to stay neutral, even if inside he was anything but.

What the fuck am I even doing? Lanna thought he was with the CCC, and he had no way to prove himself one.

He kept following her in silence, watching the tight set of her shoulders in front of him. Plausible deniability, man. As long as you don’t technically admit to being some kind of government agent, surely you can’t get in trouble, right? Right?

Now, it was only the fact she walked ahead that hid his grimace.

Lanna stopped in front of a dark wooden door in the back of the inn. A window nearby showed the courtyard with the outbuildings, and the willows by the river beyond them. Fortunately, there was enough of a breeze in the air to mask the smell of shit coming from the pigsty.

“I’ll show you the dungeon records,” she said. Worried eyes flitted back and forth down the corridor before they settled on Alex. “And you can check by yourself that they haven’t been altered.”

Alex didn’t say anything, just raised both his eyebrows. As if daring her to go on and open the door. No reason to incriminate myself even further.

Lanna pursed her lips, then nodded, and pulled a key out of her pocket.

xx

It was a library. A small one, true, but very charming, with a couple of snug chairs around a small hearth, and two walls filled with leather- and wood-bound books. In the third wall, a work desk sat devoid of anything beyond a few loose papers and ink.

“Is this your father’s personal study or something?” asked Alex, glancing around the room.

“Does it matter?” she said sharply.

No small talk, then. Fair enough. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

Lanna was already thumbing the covers in a row of books, looking for something. She clicked her tongue when she got to the end then moved down a row, restarting the process. Shrugging, Alex decided to take a look at the other wall. Unlike the thick record books Lanna was inspecting, the ones on this side of the room were smaller and better made, bound in leather and with fancy finishings.

He pulled one out of the shelf. An Accounting of the Seventh Rose War of 791, by Mannair Broent, the title read. Alex read the first page and nearly drooled to balance the writing’s dryness, so he put it back in its place, with perhaps more force than necessary. He picked out another, larger tome. The Eternal Wars - Volume 2, by Sannet. Eyeing the same row, Alex saw there were four other books with the same title, for a total of five volumes.

Some wars they must have been. These could well be interesting, but he would need years to catch up with all the important wars for a whole new world, and it was still likely to leave him stumped. He needed something more general—basic knowledge.

It wasn’t meant to be, however. A sudden ‘aha’ from behind him pulled him back from his search. Lanna gestured to him as she carried a thick book over to the desk. She plopped it down atop it with a heavy thud, and proceeded to open it into the latest updated page. It was easy to determine where that was since every thirtieth or so page had a pale pink flower pressed against it.

“There, the latest entry for the dungeon scheduled pruning.” She pointed a finger at the small, hand-written text.

Walking over, Alex made a show of inspecting the neat writing and the flower squashed on the page. He even went so far as to smell it—no scent at all, surprisingly. He didn’t expect to find anything on Cedric here, not after Orson vouched so vehemently for him.

Alex didn’t have a personal vendetta against the man, it just made the most sense with the way he had been acting about the forest and his old crew. Plus the smile. He just couldn’t get over how too-bright, too-nice it was. People weren’t that righteous.

But whether Cedric was the culprit or not, the dungeon was overflowing, even the prompt for his quest confirmed it. And if he wanted to complete it, he needed all the information he could get his hands on.

That meant that, now that he was here, he needed to make the most of the opportunity.

Alex hummed. “It does appear it’s in order,” he said, going back on the book to the other flower-marked pages to compare. “Appear being the important word.”

“What?”

Alex opened his mouth to imply that she might be into it with Cedric, just to see what else she spouted, but something in her eyes stopped him. Something familiar. If he said the words, Alex realized, and actually accused her of this, she would feel like he felt when Orson called him a thief.

Ah, damn it. Why is this a line I don’t want to cross? He shook his head and settled for saying, “I need to check the other records. There are still monsters coming out of the dungeon before they should. If Cedric isn’t to blame, then something else is going on here.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, eyes doubtful.

“You heard the conversation,” Alex said, moving back toward the record wall and pointing at all the books. “I was attacked outside of the dungeon. A month before that’s even supposed to be a possibility. That’s dangerous. Something's not right here in Riverbend. I need to know if this has happened before. And if it has, why.”

Lanna had stopped to consider him. Her mouth parted open as if she didn’t know what to say. “I… I thought this was about incriminating Cedric,” she said after a moment.

“It’s not.” It was about completing his quest, in reality. But Alex would let her believe what she wanted.

“Da doesn’t know I have the key to his study,” she said. “We really can’t be here.” She bit her lip. “But I’ve been up since before dawn preparing for breakfast. He’ll already expect me to take a break now, either way. And he’ll be out front for hours still.” Swallowing, Lanna gave him one last look before she walked up to stand beside him. “What are we looking for?”

Right about now, ‘I have no clue’ didn’t sound like the appropriate answer. Alex only knew one thing, actually, but it would have to be enough. He examined the whole of the book shelf in front of him.

“Inconsistencies,” he told her. “Any time a pruning has been done ahead of schedule, or if there’s any recordings of the same situation we are in—monsters escaping the dungeon before they are supposed to.”

xx

“Here!” Lanna’s voice snapped him from the monotony of another record book. “Thirty three years ago. In the summer. Two and a half weeks before they had scheduled a pruning.”

Alex put down his tome and sighed. “Two, then… in more than thirty five years.”

He had found another one earlier, fourteen years ago, when some of the most distant trappers and hunters from Riverbend had reported gory sites of dead animals in the forests close to the dungeon for a week, before they spotted the sounder of wild boars responsible. That had happened almost a month before they were due a pruning.

“Unless Cedric has been planning since before he was even a thought in his mother’s mind, then it’s definitely not him,” said Lanna.

“Yes, yes,” Alex said, waving an airy hand. “We’ve established that already.”

She smiled victoriously. The mood had lightened considerably after his suspicions for Cedric faded, and Lanna seemingly started to think that Alex at least had some altruistic intentions behind his search.

So he had to ask a question that’d been burning through his mind the whole morning. “Why would you show me the records if you can’t be sure I am who you say I am?”

Lanna cocked her head to the side. “Simple,” she said. “If you were then I’d be proving Cedric’s innocence to the CCC.” Then the dimpled smile on her face turned sharp. “If you were not, then you wouldn’t have spent the last few hours digging through the records with me and I would’ve called you out to my da’ and everyone else in the village.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. Clever—and ruthless, too—but not quite on the mark. He kept any response to himself.

“I would’ve gotten into a bit of trouble with da’, but that’s about it,” she finished, looking pleased with herself.

Pointing at the book in her hands, Alex tried to steer the conversation back on topic. “Tell me more about this last one,” he said. “When did it happen? How? And any clue as to why it happened at all would be even more important.”

Her eyes scanned the page for another second before she gasped. “A whole hamlet was attacked in the night by boars and killer sloths. Barely anyone survived.” She had a finger on the page, following each line as she read. Her smile had vanished entirely. “It was in the summer, the survivors fled to Holdensfor. This was when the town still had the title to the dungeon. I know the name of the magistrate who wrote this, too. Da’ knew him. He died when I was three, sixteen years ago.”

“Then I can’t see any relationship between them and now beyond the fact it happened.” Alex sighed, brows scrunched up in thought. “Different seasons, different people reporting the monsters at different spots.” He shook his head. “This makes no sense.”

“Is that going to happen here in Riverbend?” she asked, voice tight with fear. Her pale orange eyes pleaded with him. “Is that why you came?”

Maybe why I was kidnapped, definitely not why I came though. It wasn’t a coincidence that this was happening just as he arrived via interdimensional suckhole fourteen years after it last occurred, then nineteen years before that. It just couldn’t be.

“No,” Alex replied, though to which question he didn’t say. Best let her come to her own conclusions. “And definitely not if we prune it right away.”

Lanna nodded, more to herself than anything. “Right, you’re right.” She let out a nervous breath. “So we just tell Cedric and my father about everything, then he can just sign it off on another pruning, if a bit earlier.”

“No,” Alex said quickly. And out the whole story? Including me as the fictional CCC agent with no credentials whatsoever? Pass. “No. This—” and he pointed at her and himself and the books “—is off the record. It never happened. I need to look into this further. At the dungeon, before some fear stricken villagers run it out of proportion and this gets back to the higher ups.”

Just a sprinkle of a white lie that he felt like an asshole for doing, but they’d been there yesterday with no problem, even if it wasn’t at the specific time the dungeon needed to stay neighbor-friendly. And the roaming boars were hours away from the village. That meant so long as it was solved soon, it’d be a win-win for everyone.

“But you’ll prune it, right?” Lanna frowned. “You can get this done?”

Alex looked at the quest that flashed up as he thought of it. “Yes, today, in fact,” he said. “But remember, I’m just a hopeful. I need to take Cedric and the crew with me. So today, at lunch, you’ll help me convince them—discreetly—to go back to the dungeon and prune it. Alright?”

Lanna seemed unconvinced at being deceptive for a moment there, but she quickly nodded. “For Riverbend,” she said, “I’ll do it.”

Alex allowed himself a small smile. See, some good will come with the selfishness of my quest. There was no reason a liar like him couldn’t be a hero too, right?